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Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Ashley Weinberg, a Ph.D candidate working with Prof. Jennifer Steele was recently elected to serve as SPSP Student Committee member-at-large. For more information on the SPSP Student Committee, click here.

Ashley Weinberg, M.A.

Publicly written statement from Ashley to SPSP membership:

My name is Ashley Weinberg and I was recently elected to serve as SPSP Student Committee member-at-large. In this position I intend to help SPSP student members garner a strong sense of belonging within SPSP and the larger psychological community. I aim to foster natural and genuine connections between student members and the SPSP membership body by realistically addressing hurdles that often prevent this from happening. I will pursue these goals by (1) using feedback from students to respond to these impediments, (2) working to acknowledge concerns specific to diverse student members—especially minority and international students, and (3) providing positive and informal opportunities for networking with other students and more established SPSP members. As SPSP member-at-large I plan to implement and initiate programs and work focused on building academic community and attending to the diverse needs of this community.

Monday, January 08, 2018

Katrina Fong, who just recently graduated with her Ph.D in Social & Personality Psychology from York U just accepted a position as a Research Analyst at Explorer Research, a biometric market research firm.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Taryn Nepon defended her PhD Dissertation entitled: "Trait Perfectionism and Perfectionistic Self-Presentation in Psychological Distress: The Mediational Role of Self-Image Goals" on December 7th, 2017.

Monday, December 04, 2017

The Social-Personality Colloquium Series (Brownbag) was pleased to feature Dr. Brett Ford who gave a talk titled: Striving to Feel Good: The Costs and Benefits of Emotion Regulation

For more information, visit Dr. Ford's website or contact her directly.

Dr. Brett Ford

ABSTRACT: Emotion regulation has been shown to have many benefits across affective, cognitive, social and even physiological outcomes. In spite of the wide-spread benefits of emotion regulation, however, emotion regulation may also have unintended negative consequences within particular contexts. One particularly salient context is the realm of political action (e.g., volunteering, donating, protesting), which can be fuelled by negative emotions. Because people often strive to repair such emotions, effective forms of emotion regulation (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) could have the unintended consequence of hindering action. We tested this hypothesis using correlational, longitudinal, and experimental designs in six samples of Clinton voters after the 2016 U.S. general election. Overall, we found that individuals who used cognitive reappraisal to cope with their feelings about politics were less likely to engage in political action. An indirect effect was also observed such that cognitive reappraisal predicted lower negative emotion which in turn accounted for lower intentions to engage in political action. These results suggest that effective emotion regulation like reappraisal may be individually beneficial in the short-run by helping restore emotional well-being after upsetting political events but may also be collectively costly in the long-run by reducing the potential for productive political action.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Dr. Hyunji Kim is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Joni Sasaki’s lab. She has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship for her research, "Self-enhancement and its consequences: a cultural psychological approach.” Her postdoctoral fellowship research will explore cultural and individual differences in self-perception as well as the consequences of self-enhancement using multiple methods.

She has also recently published two book chapters with Dr. Joni Sasaki and an article in the Journal of Personality.